08 July 2018 1:14 AM

All I ask is that we stop assuming that everyone is captivated by football. Millions of us (I strongly suspect) are bored by it and quite a few positively dislike it.

But over the past few days, it has been unwise to admit this in public. That’s another thing wrong with the football cult: its belief that everyone really ought to belong and the faint feeling of menace if you won’t join in.

Look, I don’t go and picket stadiums telling football fans they’re wrong or barge into pubs and turn off the football on the TV so that I can have a bit of peace. I wouldn’t do that even if I was a lot bigger and stronger than I am.

But could you just please not say to me ‘Wasn’t it great last night? (if it was great), or ‘Wasn’t it terrible last night?’ (if, as is usually more likely, it was terrible). And don’t say it to anyone else, either, unless you know they’re keen.

It’s very similar to the equally infuriating assumption, common among weather forecasters, that everybody likes hot, sunny weather. Lots of people don’t, and I am currently longing for the western wind to blow again and the thrilling sound of rain beating on the roof at night.

But it is worse. I have played plenty of football and it’s an enjoyable game to play. I have been to big-league matches in giant stadiums and to smaller games lower down the leagues because people have told me I will enjoy myself. I’ve tried watching it on TV because I was assured I would enjoy that.

And I didn’t. There are two reasons. It may once have been exciting, but modern football is extremely dull, which is perhaps why so many big matches have to be decided by shoot-outs which are not really football.

I have never actually seen a goal scored, live, in professional football – because there are so few of them and because I have been so bored for so long that my brain has glazed over and my mind has wandered.

What I have seen is an endless festival of cheating, faking, professional fouls and spiteful minor violence. This is interesting in a way but it is also unpleasant.

And the unpleasantness seems to fit quite neatly into the sweary, loutish, rather callous, unthinkingly Leftish and intolerant modern Britain that I don’t much like either. The New Labour Commissar Alastair Campbell, beyond doubt a real football fan, typifies this.

But I was fascinated by the way that other Blairites, often Oxford graduates from genteel suburbs, all claimed to be keen football supporters and by the Blair creature’s own pretence of being one. David Cameron felt the need to copy this, posing intermittently as a supporter of Aston Villa and of West Ham. Even poor Theresa May (who I suspect cares about as much about football as she does about car mechanics) has had to join in, with aides leaking tales about her being unable to bear the tension of the penalty shoot-out.

It is this sort of thing which makes me feel I have to say, very openly, that I am not a supporter of any team, that I dislike professional football and couldn’t care less whether the English football team (which doesn’t represent me in any way) wins or loses its games.

We aren’t going to be richer, happier or safer if they win, or worse off if they lose. It very fundamentally doesn’t matter, while lots of other things – that nobody gets worked up about at all – matter greatly.There are many more like me, but they keep very quiet about it and go along with the shouting and backslapping so as to fit in.

That’s exactly why I won’t do it. There’s altogether too much fitting in and conformism going on now and, in such an atmosphere, it’s an actual duty not to pretend to join in with the crowd.

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The badge that shames a high street giant

If a major retailer sold children’s bikes and equipment marked with the swastika, there’d be a huge uproar and denunciations in Parliament. But actually, they wouldn’t dare.

Yet Halfords have, for some years (they tell me), been displaying bikes and equipment, right, bearing the almost equally repulsive symbol of tyranny and mass murder, the hammer and sickle.

The whole ‘X-Rated’ range is rather odd, with strong undertones of macho violence, like the nastier computer games. It is marketed as ‘bad stuff for your bike’ and includes valve caps in the shape of bullets and hand-grenades. They say ‘the image used on a small number of cycling products whilst bearing a similarity is not the flag of the Soviet Union’, adding they do not wish to cause offence and have had no complaints.

Well, they have had a complaint now, so won’t be able to say that again. I am baffled by the use of the communist emblem, which once adorned the badges of concentration camp guards. Did they really think it made the goods more attractive?

And why, after all this time, do so many people still not grasp that communism was as murderous as the Nazis and that the hammer and sickle is a badge of shame and murder?

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Neglected Emily is a delight

I don’t think this has ever happened to me before, but the other day my wife and I were the only two people in a whole, large cinema, for a showing of the new film The Bookshop, starring Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy. Despite some very severe two-star reviews, we had decided that we liked the sound of it, and went anyway.

No doubt it is not a blockbuster and has its flaws. But it has several delightful moments and (being filmed mainly in Northern Ireland) is often rather beautiful to look at.

It was far better than several films I have seen over the past few years which have had much better reviews. How unfair these things can be.

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As idiots in this country continue to press madly for marijuana legalisation, places which have already gone soft on this dangerous drug try to row back. South Australia’s government wants to restore tough penalties for marijuana possession, following a horrible murder in which (yet again) the killer was a marijuana smoker who had been repeatedly let off by the law.

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The wildly over-rated MP Tom Tugendhat, who amazingly is chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, rages to anyone who will listen about the iniquities of Russia. Well, no doubt. But I think such people do this to make up for the fact that we are too scared to complain about the even greater wickedness of China and Saudi Arabia. Last week, I saw a gaggle of Chinese soldiers, in uniform, being conducted by obsequious British civil servants through St James’s Park.

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Is it the incessant hot weather, or is it something else? People have started hooting their car horns much more often than they used to. If it carries on like this, our streets will be as madly, uselessly noisy as those of Italy.

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21 August 2016 2:07 AM

Imagine a country that isn’t very successful, but wants to boost its image in the world. Its economy is rocky, its cities grubby and run-down. Its education system isn’t much good.So this country spends huge sums of scarce money and great effort to find young men and women who can win medals in international sporting competitions. It carefully chooses sports where the competition is weak. It relentlessly drives the chosen athletes. And it works. At home and abroad, its image is transformed. Its national media go into hysterics over each medal. The people at home forget for a moment the dreariness of their lives. The anthem plays and the flag flies high. The country I am thinking of is East Germany, the self-styled ‘German Democratic Republic’. You may remember the superb figure skater Katarina Witt, who won Winter Olympic gold medals in 1984 and 1988, and a pile of other awards for her ghastly country in the years just before it collapsed in a cloud of rust.What did her triumphs prove? Nothing much, except that state power can achieve sporting success. In which case, what is so joyous about it? If sport is about anything, surely it is about individual achievement, not plans, budgets and political prestige.What could be further from the burning individual talents and grit celebrated in Chariots Of Fire than some Ministry of Sport fulfilling its medal plan?But what, deep down, is the difference between this episode and Sir John Major’s dash for Olympic gold which has now paid off in Brazil? In fact, I think our state-sponsored medal programme may be worse in some ways than East Berlin’s because, as a free society, we had the power to question it and we didn’t.It might also be worth recalling that Sir John’s much-praised initiative was financed mainly by the Lottery – in which a British government for the first time actively encouraged gambling, especially among the vulnerable poor, the main payers of this tax on false hope. Indeed, Sir John’s legacy of gambling and debt, forced on students in the universities he so wildly expanded, may be his main memorial. You may say, quite rightly, that I am jaundiced because I couldn’t care less about sport. My sympathies in Rio lie mainly with the empty, wet seats, which beautifully sum up my view of the Olympics. But even if I were an enthusiast for Underwater Motorcycling, Bovine Ballet or Synchronised Sunburn, or whatever it is we currently lead the world in, I’d still have the same misgivings. This is what failed and powerless countries do to make themselves feel better. It is an illusion, and when it ends, things will be worse than they were before.

Tragic Victims of our deal with the devil

Who can fail to be moved and grieved by the sight of a small child in distress? But please do not let your emotions stop you thinking.The picture of the shocked Aleppo survivor, Omran Daqneesh, like that of the drowned child Alan Kurdi last year, should not be allowed to enforce a conformist opinion on the world. The death of Alan Kurdi did not mean that it was wise to fling wide the borders of Europe (as Germany’s Angela Merkel now well knows). The rescue of Omran Daqneesh should not make us side with the bloody and merciless Syrian rebels. Why is Aleppo a war zone in the first place? Do you know? I will tell you. Syria was a peaceful country until it was deliberately destabilised by Saudi Arabia and its fanatical, sectarian Gulf allies, consumed with hatred for the Assad government and, above all, its ally Iran. Worse, this monstrous intervention was supported by the USA, Britain and France, all sucking up to the Saudis for oil, money and arms contracts. In the hope of bringing down Assad, we made a devil’s bargain with some of the worst fanatics in the Middle East, people who make Anjem Choudary look like the Vicar of Dibley.We know of Britain’s role for certain because of the very strange case of Bherlin Gildo, a Swedish man accused by British authorities of attending a terror training camp in Syria. His trial collapsed in June 2015 because his defence lawyers argued that the terror groups he was accused of supporting had been helped by British intelligence.The Assad state, as you might expect, defended itself against its attackers, helped in the end by Iran and Russia.And the war which followed was the ruin of Syria, whose innocent people found their peaceful cities and landscape turned into a screaming battlefield, as it still is. If you are truly grieved by the picture of poor little Omran, just be careful who you blame.

Anjem Choudary, broadcasting’s favourite Islamist loudmouth, was and is a vain, bloviating, blowhard fraud, another boozy drug-taking low-life posing as a serious person. He found a role and fools to indulge him, many in the same media who now queue up to rejoice at his imprisonment.But I do not feel safer from terror now that he is locked up. Worse, I feel less safe from Chairman May’s sour-faced surveillance state, which takes a dim and narrow view of free speech and liberty. Choudary has been locked up not for what he did but for what he said. Claims he influenced anyone into crime are thin. Even the sneaky wording of the Terrorism Act, in which he was charged with ‘inviting’ support for IS, is suspicious.It sounds like ‘inciting’, and is meant to, for incitement to terror and murder is a real crime, even in free countries. But it isn’t the same as ‘inviting’, a much weaker word. You may gloat that Choudary is eating Islamic porridge. But be careful what you gloat over. A law as loose as this could easily be used against anyone the state doesn’t like. I predict that it will be, too.By the way, I spent several hours last week circling Government offices trying to find out how many such charges there have been – the CPS sent me to the Justice Ministry, they told me to call the Home Office, who sent me back to the CPS. This pathetic pass-the-parcel evasion suggests they don’t care much. This stuff is propaganda, not genuine security.

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A few days ago I took part in a recorded BBC debate on prisons, What Point Prison?, which will be transmitted on Radio 4 at 8pm on Wednesday

There was a startling exchange on capital punishment between me and Erwin James, a penitent convicted murderer much admired by liberals, who has now become a distinguished writer on prisons. You may be surprised at what he said.

07 June 2015 1:26 AM

Why is a Tory Government nationalising all the schools in England? The simple answer is that the Tories have swallowed New Labour and turned into Blairites, which is true.

But there’s a deeper mystery. Why does anyone think that shiny new buildings, new names and lots of money will solve the problem of our horrible state-school system, a costly, organised insult to the children of the poor?

It is interesting that while they claim to have been liberated from Left-wing pressure by getting rid of the Liberal Democrats, Mr Cameron’s Cabinet have no plans to restore the selective grammar schools that once opened the road of success to the poor.

That would be a real conservative policy, and they won’t be having any of those. Comprehensive schools were imposed on the country by Labour in the 1960s as a giant piece of social engineering, designed to make the country more equal, even if it meant education standards declined.

The Tories, as usual, spinelessly gave in to this, because most of them sent their children to private schools and didn’t know or care about the state system.

Whatever you think of the comprehensive idea (I think it is stupid and wrong), it failed from the outset. What happened was that a minority of comprehensive schools, usually in expensive catchment areas, maintained reasonable standards, though not as good as those of the abolished grammars.

The rest sank, often well below the standards of the secondary moderns they replaced, not least because they were so huge and hard to control. There was no equality, and education got worse.

National educational policy ever since then has been a sort of grand cover-up, one that makes Fifa look clean and honest. Rather than admit they were wrong, Tory and Labour governments have tried to mask the disaster with diluted examinations, plus a parade of expensive stunts and gimmicks.

The latest and most persistent is the ‘academy’. Our privately schooled Education Secretary declared last week that she is taking powers to turn hundreds more schools into ‘academies’, on the grounds that they are failing. Does she think a change of name will stop them failing?I defy you to tell me what the term actually means for the education of those who go to them. It embraces trendy ‘free schools’ and establishments that were bog-standard comps a week ago.

Experts on the subject will tell you that they were notorious for gaming the exam system to make their results look better than they are. For years they were not even subject to the Freedom of Information Act. They are now, but hard evidence of their success is still difficult to find.

Oodles of cash and barnstorming charismatic heads can and do (for a while) raise standards in rescued schools.But the cash can’t go on for ever, and there are many more schools than there are charismatic heads, so solid long-term improvement is hard to detect.

Experts do not agree that academies are necessarily beneficial. Former Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove is certainly not convinced.

Rather than send his own daughter to Burlington Danes Academy, which he had loudly praised and which is a short walk from his home, he dispatched her instead to a highly traditional and selective all-girls Church secondary miles away, as near to a grammar school as you can get in London. Actions speak louder than words.

But if you want words, try the House of Commons Select Committee on Education, which said in January: ‘The Government should stop exaggerating the success of academies and be cautious about firm conclusions except where the evidence merits it. Academisation is not always successful, nor is it the only proven alternative for a struggling school.’

And then there’s the issue of central control. Aren’t we supposed to think that nationalisation is bad, that small is beautiful, and openness and accountability are virtues?

Then let me introduce you to the Education Funding Agency, with a budget of £54 billion a year, the mysterious body that is ultimately in charge of all the ‘academies’ in Britain, and will soon be in charge of a lot more.

Like so many of these arm’s-length ‘agencies’ (public and private) that run much of modern Britain, it doesn’t even seem to have its own postal address or phone number, but is buried in bits and pieces of the Education Department.

What it really means is that a strong centralised state is rapidly taking control of education in this country.

If the private schools think they can escape its tentacles, they are very much mistaken. All my instincts rebel against so much power in so few hands.

But what is even worse is that this power-grab is being dressed up as an improvement in education, when it is not, and that the proven way to make schools better and fairer – academic selection – is being ignored.

The great EU stitch-up gathers steam

Be careful what you wish for. Is it just me, or do I see a growing dawning of doubt about the referendum among anti-EU types?

Mr Cameron’s new friend Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the European Commission, was absolutely right when he pointed out that the Government is not seeking an exit from the EU, and ‘Cameron wants to dock his country permanently in Europe’.

A defeat for the anti-EU side in a referendum will, of course, achieve this, diminishing all the ‘Eurosceptic’ poseurs in the Tory Party to the pointless blowhards they really are. What will they do then, to pretend they are patriots?

Oh, and talking of defeat, spending rules for the referendum have already been cleverly devised so that the ‘Yes’ side can spend up to £17million, while the ‘No’ side will be limited to £8million. It’s done by giving each political party an allocation, on top of the equal limits for the actual campaigns.

And a law which would have banned pro-EU promotions by public bodies in the last 28 days of the campaign has been quietly dropped. All this goes on undiscussed, while we obsess about Sepp Blatter.

Another slice of my life rides into history

You know you are old when what you still think of as recent films are remade.

The 1967 version of Far From The Madding Crowd, with Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp, is scorched into my memory.

I can’t see how it could possibly be improved, and Christie and Stamp also perfectly embodied the rather wild and beautiful aspect of the 1960s that now seems so sad and wasted, lost in disappointment and failure.

Yet I know that for millions of people, Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts will become Thomas Hardy’s characters from now on, and what I still think of as fresh and new will become a flickering archive.

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What will still be Royal about the Royal Mail, after it has all been sold off?

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22 April 2013 12:32 PM

This article will eventually get round to the nasty behaviour of two individuals on Twitter on Saturday evening. But first, I’ll explain why it seems to me to be interesting. Those of you who use Twitter, that strange form of communication, may have noticed that I refer to myself, there as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’. Amusingly, members of the Twitter mob (for that is all it is, an electronic mob) scold me for doing so.

If they had the sense of humour they always accuse me of not having, they might see that my use of the words was not wholly serious. But then again, I suppose they know little of history, propaganda or language. They don’t know that such phrases have actually been employed (quite seriously) in the newspapers, broadcasts and speeches of totalitarian states to describe deposed former rulers or other figures whom they wished to destroy or disparage.

In my experience, when someone says that ‘x has no sense of humour’, it almost always means ‘x does not have the same sense of humour that I have’.

Now, I’m happy (for instance) not to share the sense of humour of the noisy football fan who, not long ago, wrecked my train journey by repeatedly (about every 45 seconds) cackling (in a surprisingly high-pitched way, for he was otherwise aggressively masculine), at his own jokes, joined by his companions, who may have been hoping that he would buy the next ten cans of Strongbow. Nothing else explains their exaggerated mirth.

There’s a strange belief, borne out by nothing, that laughter is necessarily a measure of happiness. In fact, if you don’t know the context, it is very hard to tell , in a photograph of a laughing or weeping person, whether he is expressing woe or mirth. It can be quite sinister (as when the emaciated, half-starved and tortured show-trial defendant's trousers fall round his ankes, in Costa Gavras's great but hard-to-find film'The Confession('L'Aveu')).

For many people, collective laughter (like that which so often greets the weary jests of Mayor Al Johnson at Tory rallies) is just a sign of belonging to a gang, and often of toadying subservience to the leader of that gang.

Listening to this can be a form of torture, if you’re not part of that gang, and not enraptured. I don’t like being part of any gang, which is why I never watched ‘Yes, Minister’. Reading it, I find it quite funny and perceptive. But like a lot of people, I cannot bear canned laughter, telling me what I ought to think funny. Yet I know (and so do broadcasters) that others find canned mirth helpful to their enjoyment. It is actually more interesting that some people like canned laughter, than that some people don’t. Perhaps this is another sign of the important distinction between introverts and extroverts, one of the deepest gulfs in human behaviour, which is at last being discussed. For quite a lot of us introverts, your pleasure is our misery.

There is no balance here. Introvert pleasures, which tend (by their nature) to be private and quiet rather than noisy and publicly shared, cause no positive discomfort to anyone else. But crowds, spotting an outsider, are often displeased by his unwillingness to join in. In primitive societies, people like me are usually clubbed to death quite early on in our lives, having been marked down as outsiders, not to be trusted as members of The Gang or Tribe (This is more or less what happens in ‘Lord of the Flies’). We can only survive in quite complex civilisations. I'll leave it to you to decide if our increased chances of survival are a good thing.

Conscious of this, I am quite careful to efface myself, my tastes and (above all) my plummy voice in certain circumstances. One of these is on evenings when my homebound train is taken over by large crowds of noisy football fans. There is, at present, no actual danger. But there isa sort of feeling that the normal rules don’t apply, and the sensible thing to do is to endure quietly until it is over. Don’t even try to enforce the rules in the quiet carriage ( an interesting reflection on our society is that there are always many fewer quiet carriages than there are noisy ones).

These people enjoy shouting, and loud tuneless singing, and when there are enough of them (and they tend to walk very heavily and aggressively up and down the train, to point out that they are now in charge) nobody can interfere with their pleasure, which is probably a Human Right. Ticket validity takes a bit of a back seat, too. Very few ticket collectors come out of the little locked cubicles which are these days provided for them where the lavatories used to be, during these journeys. Why would they come out? They’re not paid enough for such confrontations. I’m always filled with admiration for the few who do actually enforce the rules, men and women who could probably lead an infantry charge in battle. I feel, too, for the Buffet car staff, who just have to put up with it. If things get seriously difficult, the train may stop for the Transport Police to get on. But all they do is apply collective punishment to the whole train, delaying hundreds of inoffensive passengers while they debate with the rowdies (in the knowledge that if they took any serious action, the CPS and the courts would let them down, a knowledge which the rowdies increasingly share).

Anyway, the other evening, it really wasn’t too bad. The football fans were shouting, and marching about, but there weren’t enough of them for critical mass and I had a pleasant journey, with a cup of tea and a biscuit, reading the vast acreage of the Saturday papers which I hadn’t got round to in the morning. How little I knew.

The following morning, I made one of my occasional checks on the Internet, which these days includes a dip into Twitter, This always reminds me of a long ago childhood boat-trip with a Devon fisherman, during a seaside holiday. Was it at Hope Cove, our favourite holiday spot of the time? I rather think so. He was visiting his lobster pots, a slow round in a rowing boat. Several were empty, but it was interesting and enjoyable (heartless as I then was) to haul one up to find an angry, clawed creature trapped within.

And on Sunday morning, my Twitter lobster pots, often bulging with snappy comments remarking that ‘Peter Hitchens is a ****’ or asking peevishly ‘Why did the wrong Hitchens die?’ were not that full. Even the righteous crusaders, who seek to blame me for the measles outbreak, had gone quiet. They were not of course admitting that the NHS ‘MMR or nothing’ policy might have been at fault, but they were unable to counter my rather unanswerable point that this policy, if it was aimed at maximum immunisation, has demonstrably failed.

But what was this? A person, accompanying his post with what seemed to be a real name and a real photograph of a rather vain-looking, melodramatic person with a high collar and severe, swept-back hair (though for all I know it is a picture of someone else) , had written, around the time I was on my train:

‘I seem to be on the same train as Peter Hitchens. How many cheers do you think I’d get if I knocked him out mid-journey?’

There were a number of responses to this. One, from a person who also provided a picture of a smirking young man, which somehow seemed to me to have been taken in the back bedroom of his parents’ house, joined in with ‘Do something to his voice box. If you have a biro to hand that would be perfect’. He used a pseudonym.

A couple of people had chided the original Tweeter, one saying he’d get more cheers if he threw himself on the tracks (Not very nice, but he’d raised the question of cheers and violence). Another said it wasn’t very heroic to threaten to assault a 60-year-old man ( 61, actually, but not yet wholly decrepit, all the same) . Then there was some discussion about how my putative assailant’s work might be affected, with him saying it was only an unpaid internship, so it didn’t matter.

Well, I immediately got my Technical, Forensic and Legal Departments involved. So I have a screenshot of the original , and various other inquiries and actions are in train (sorry, no pun intended) . I also responded to the original Tweeter, asking him if it was an actual threat of violence, and if he had any idea of what he was saying.

Many hours later (It was a lovely Spring day) I checked back and found, not to my surprise, that my putative assailant’s bravado had melted into a lukewarm puddle. His swaggering Tweet had been deleted. He had sent messages claiming to have attempted to apologise to me, but I have not seen any sign of this. His whole account is now 'protected' which means I can't check back on this. Nor has he responded to two messages from me asking if he has anything to say in his defence. The accompanying suggestion from the other person (in some ways even nastier, because so detailed, and because it was a direct and open incitement to severe violence against me), about the voicebox and the biro, was still on display.

Now, I disapprove of the police overreaction to some statements on Twitter, expressions of opinion and obviously unserious stuff born out of exasperation. And I am a forgiving person, if those who offend against me show any sign of genuine contrition. So I am as yet undecided as to how far I shall take this.

But I think that those who tell me off for describing myself light-heartedly as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’ might ask themselves a little about the extraordinary personalised loathing, mingled with assumed moral superiority, which the self-righteous Left repeatedly express towards those who dissent from their view. I ask them to imagine taking a peaceful train journey, and to find later that they had been sharing it with people thinking thoughts like these.

07 April 2013 12:01 AM

I should have thought fascism had a lot in common with football. Both like huge mass rallies in ugly, grandiose buildings, in which the enraptured mob chants gormless, unpleasant slogans and sings unpleasant songs.

Both have personality cults. Both involve the worship of strutting, violent, dishonest and selfish people. Both are almost wholly masculine in a boozy, sweaty, muscle-bound way that sometimes makes me wonder if Germaine Greer doesn’t have a point about men.

The enthusiasts of both are, among other things, very boring conversationalists, if you don’t happen to share their passion.

Both demand the adulation of youth and strength, and both require a great deal of very bad acting, shouting, posturing, eye-rolling and fake injuries or at least fake grievances. Both are based on an angry intolerance of rivals and both spill rapidly into serious violence, given half a chance.

So the only surprise about the revelation that Paolo Di Canio once said he was a fascist is the honesty involved. Mind you, why did it take so long for it to come out? Wasn’t poor old Swindon important enough for anyone to care that its football team was run by a man who liked giving straight-arm salutes?

But here comes the really funny bit: the resignation of the supposed political giant David Miliband from his posts at Sunderland Football Club, because he couldn’t bear to be linked with this totalitarian monster.

Now, I know from personal experience that the supposedly brilliant Mr Miliband isn’t that clued up about life (he survived some years as Foreign Secretary without even knowing that this country had conferred a knighthood on Robert Mugabe). But there’s something else here that needs to be remembered. In October 2012, a man called Eric Hobsbawm died. Professor Hobsbawm was at least as fine a historian as Mr Di Canio is a footballer.

But, alas, he was a lifelong supporter of communism, an unapologetic defender of the Soviet Union in the days of purges, mass murder and the slave camps of the Gulag. I’ve no doubt he gave the occasional clenched fist salute in his time, but I’ve seen no pictures.

Soon after his death, the other Miliband issued a statement saying that Hobsbawm was ‘a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family’. So did the young David Miliband stalk righteously from the room when this grisly old Stalinist apologist came round for comradely tea and buns, as I believe he did quite often?

Of course not. Mr Miliband only objects to one sort of violent, murderous political creed. The other sort is fine by him. The British Left-wing elite has hopeless double standards about dictators, and for some reason always gets away with it.

What do you think would happen if the Nazi Horst Wessel Song were sung at the funeral of a Tory politician? Yet the Internationale, the anthem of world communism, was sung at the Edinburgh funeral of Labour’s Robin Cook in 2005, and nobody fussed. It was played at the memorial service of Tony Benn’s wife Caroline in 2001 (and one very senior Labour apparatchik was heard to sigh: ‘Great to hear language we aren’t allowed to use any longer’).

The same suspect song was played at the Glasgow obsequies of another Labour Minister, Donald Dewar, in 2000, and the congregation joined in. They knew the words.

The excuse was offered: ‘It’s a grand tune, whatever you think of the politics.’ The Hitlerite Horst Wessel Song also has a fine tune, but I doubt the Edinburgh or Glasgow mourners would have stood by and let it be sung.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who is prepared to apologise for either fascism or communism should be a pariah, in football, politics or anywhere else. But you cannot scorn the one and be soft on the other.

Fancy that. Research shows that going soft on cannabis means more people take dangerous drugs.

Next, they’ll find out that printing money leads to inflation, and that cheap booze sold without limit means more drunkenness.

The BBC's vile Village betrays our history

Revolutionaries always defame the past to try to make us content with the horrible present. But I have seldom seen such tripe as the BBC’s The Village.

Teachers are savage disciplinarians. Husbands beat wives. The upper classes are snobbish and bigoted. The only likeable characters are Stoke Newington liberals from the 21st Century, presumably transported into 1914 by Doctor Who.

And the basics are wrong. The band plays Jerusalem – written in 1916. A banner reads ‘God Bless Our Troops’ – a US slogan I doubt you’d hear in Derbyshire then.

Cardboard justice created Mick Philpott

The Devil, as I was brought up to believe, finds work for idle hands. And there is no doubt that many people are corrupted in dozens of ways by the paid idleness offered to them by both major political parties.

The more I think of the way in which our great industries were destroyed, leaving millions of men with no proper work to do, the angrier I get.

But in the case of Mick Philpott, I think it is our cardboard criminal justice system that is at fault, not the welfare state. It is only thanks to the skill of doctors that Kim Hill, his first victim, survived.

Philpott stabbed her 27 times and ripped out a phone to stop anyone calling for help. I think attacks of this kind, which would certainly have led to the victim’s death 50 years ago, should be classed as murder and punished by hanging. The intent is clearly murderous. Why should the would-be killer be spared because good people have saved his victim?

But in any case the law should have responded to this foul act with more than a ‘seven-year’ sentence, an official lie told with the deliberate intention of fooling the public. In fact, he served only three years and two months.

And he did so in conditions that he no doubt found it easy to cope with – no hard labour, no discomfort, no austerity, no discipline, in short nothing that he would have feared undergoing again.

Philpott knows all about fear. As the judge noted, he liked to use his attempted murder conviction to scare his fellow creatures into doing his nasty will. But he never experienced fear himself. Two years ago, police were called when Philpott dragged his wife out of the house by her hair, after striking her. The police response to this action, committed by a known and convicted savage, was a ‘caution’ (they issue these for rape, too).

This was far worse than useless. It must have encouraged him in his justified belief that the authorities, too, were scared of him. How his neighbours must have trembled when they found out he had been let off. At the time of his final filthy offence, he was on bail after another violent attack.

I can only say it once again. If people such as Philpott are not afraid of the law – and they aren’t – then the rest of us will have to be afraid of them.

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28 July 2012 10:50 PM

Enthusiasm is compulsory only in totalitarian dictatorships. Anywhere else, we are free to be keen if we want to, and bored if we want to.

So I wish people would stop telling me that I should enjoy the Olympics, or be proud of them, or think that they will in some way benefit this country.

But they won’t stop telling me. Hardly a day goes by without another previously independent mind surrendering to this pseudo-religion of obligatory smiles.

And that makes me suspicious. What is this strange cult? In the end, the Olympics is nothing more than a large athletics meeting.

Before Hitler and Dr Goebbels made it into a torch-lit and grandiose spectacle, you could be in the same city as the Games and barely notice.

Are we really that interested? And if we are, are we interested for good reasons?

Personally, I find it very odd that large crowds have turned out in the street to see a glorified pilot light carried about in a large cheese-grater.

Even odder is the fact that there has been no fuss at all about the appalling treatment of a boy on a bicycle who had the temerity to ride alongside the procession in Haverhill, Suffolk, on Saturday, July 7.

It is hard to see from the film, but he looks about 12 to me. As he comes level with the portly torch-bearer, he is seized by a baseball-capped ‘Torch Guard’, spun round, clasped by the neck, thrown to the ground, almost in front of a moving car in the procession, which visibly brakes hard, pinned down on the road and finally hustled on to the pavement. You’d think he’d tried to assassinate the Monarch, not ridden his bike too close to the Goebbels flame.

I can’t see much difference between the behaviour of the ‘Torch Guard’ and that of the menacing Chinese goons we all disliked so much four years ago when they escorted Dr Goebbels’s candle round the world.

The event happens so quickly that most of the crowd barely notice. But I have now watched it several times, and it makes me angrier every time I do so.This is supposed to be a light-hearted, generous-spirited event.

As for it being a demonstration of the greatness of Britain, what can I say? If they gave out Olympic medals for fatherless families, deindustrialisation, graffiti, violent disorder, traffic congestion, illiteracy, swearing or really high train and bus fares, we’d be going for gold in a big way.

I suspect these are features of our country we want to hide from potential investors – in which case, why is the stadium adorned by a structure that looks like an abandoned and vandalised blast-furnace?

And then there are the alleged economic benefits. Ho, ho, ho. No doubt these will be calculated according to the Martian mathematics under which something we were told would cost £2.3 billion actually cost £9.4 billion – and this was announced as an ‘underspend’.

Will the world be impressed? Well, would you be impressed if a family in your street, who were jobless, undischarged bankrupts with delinquent children, whose roof leaked, whose wiring was dangerous, whose garden fence was rotten and whose unmown lawn was full of weeds, suddenly hired a marquee and a brigade of maids and waiters, and invited everyone to a noisy champagne party?

Count me out of the compulsory joy. It reminds me all too much of May Day in Soviet Moscow. I once thought that was all over, but now I realise that it’s coming here.

America has always been full of easily obtained guns. But Finland isn’t, and nor is Norway, and nor is Germany – yet these horrible events happen there too. What’s more, even in the USA mass killings of this type have become common only in modern times.

The other obvious line of enquiry is legal and illegal drugs, from steroids and antidepressants to cannabis. The culprits in these events are often found to have been taking one or more such drugs. The suspect in the Aurora shooting, pictured in court, where he looked physically ill, has been reliably reported to have been taking the prescription medicine Vicodin, which is often abused.

The New York Post quoted one of his neighbours as saying he had seen him smoking cannabis, a drug whose carefully created ‘peaceful’ image is contradicted in many trials of violent or homicidal people.

I might add to this the strong circumstantial evidence that Kiaran Stapleton, the terrifying young man convicted of the random murder of Indian student Anuj Bidve, is a cannabis-user. And I should mention the appalling case of David Leeman, who shot his wife Jennie dead at close range with an (illegal) gun.

An Exeter jury convicted him of manslaughter rather than murder after hearing evidence that he might have lost control of himself due to antidepressants he had been taking.

Yet when I call for an inquiry into this increasingly worrying correlation, I am invariably attacked angrily. Why? Because cannabis, antidepressants and steroids are now so widely taken, in some cases by quite influential people, that each drug has a powerful lobby fearful of what such an inquiry might conclude. That is all the more reason to hold that inquiry.

The 'Mandela' you've never heard of

Even Nelson Mandela must get tired of the adulation he attracts. Yes, he opposed a nasty tyranny; yes, he was generous to his defeated foes. But others, equally if not more deserving of honour, are forgotten and ignored.

One of these is the incredibly brave Oswaldo Paya, who for many lonely, hard years defied the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Unlike Mandela, he never supported the resort to violence.

Now he is dead, in a rather mysterious car crash. It comes nine months after the even odder decease of Laura Pollan, another brave foe of the Castros, who went down with a mystery illness and was cremated within two hours of her death.

In an unintended compliment to Mr Paya, secret police arrested 50 of the courageous Cubans who dared to attend his funeral. You have probably never heard of him because most of the British media – especially the BBC – are still soft on the Cuban communist dictatorship. But he is as great as Mandela, if not greater.

I was shocked to see two heavily tattooed police constables in London’s Whitehall last week. Should I have been? The disfigurements were visible only because they were in shirtsleeves, but that’s not new.

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15 July 2012 2:03 AM

The only thing most MPs would fight for these days is a good table in a fashionable restaurant. These bland careerists have neither passions nor beliefs.

So please do not be fooled by last week’s amateur dramatics at the Palace of Westminster.

The rage is faked. I have twice predicted it. Once, on September 25 last year, when I prophesied a ‘stage-managed split’ between the Coalition parties.

Then last March, when I wrote: ‘Both parties are worried that their collaboration has lost them voters.

So watch out for a completely made-up row between them, probably over Lords reform, followed by a Lib Dem “walkout” from the Coalition. Nick Clegg will then go off to be a Euro Commissioner, a post that falls vacant in 2014.

Vince Cable will probably take over his party.’This may now be happening a little faster than planned, mainly because the Government has no purpose except to stay in office and so has very little to do.

Some sort of diversion is also needed because its economic policy has collapsed into an insoluble combination of borrowing, bankruptcy and unemployment.

The only point of postponing the vote on Lords Reform is to avoid splitting too soon before the next Election. As for Mr Slippery’s carefully publicised ‘row’ with the supposed backbench rebel MP Jesse Norman, think about it.

Mr Norman’s crime was to tell the truth, on the record. He told fellow Tories in an email that their rebellion would be welcomed by the Prime Minister.

And so it was. After all, compare the shrugging, smiley feebleness of the Tory machine on this occasion with its ferocious, menacing repression of rebel MPs on the EU Referendum issue last October.

Proper conservatives would be working to bring back the hereditary peers who did so much good before the Blairites evicted them.

A House of Lords that is appointed, or one that is ‘elected’ via our corrupt and intolerant party machines, will be just another chamber of backstairs-crawlers.

Alas, some such House of Toadies will emerge from the Lib-Lab Coalition that is now virtually certain to take over in 2015.

PC... two deadly serious letters

I have always loathed the expression ‘Political Correctness Gone Mad’. PC is not a joke, or an accident, or the work of irrational people.

It is a chilly, deadly-serious project to turn this country into somewhere else, by scaring conservative patriots into a defeated silence.

Every so often, it reveals its true face.Here is an example. In a Fostering Handbook (The Good Practice Guide) published in 2010 by Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council, I found the following words: ‘Because the UK is institutionally racist, all white people are implicated unless they actively oppose racism.’

There it is. That’s what they think. We are all guilty until proven innocent. The entire country is infused by a form of wickedness.

So they, the Equality and Diversity Commissars, must have full powers to stamp it out.Similarly frightening thoughts were found in the Macpherson Report into the Stephen Lawrence murder.

But I have never before seen the totalitarian brutality of PC thinking expressed so clearly in an official document. And note that it is about fostering children.

When I asked Sandwell Council to confirm it was theirs, they went through several hours of foot-dragging, pointlessly demanding a copy though I had given them its full title and the relevant page number.

Eventually they said that it had been withdrawn more than a year ago. They have yet to explain why.

What concerns me is that, while the document may have been withdrawn, the thinking behind it persists in thousands of government and local authority offices throughout our country.

Henry IV versus Wimbledon? It's no contest

Why does sport take priority over everything on TV?For the first time in what seems like decades, the BBC has spent some money on making an exciting new series of Shakespeare plays.

Yet on Saturday night, Henry IV, Part 1 was postponed on BBC 2 – and almost cancelled – because of Wimbledon.

The BBC has four TV channels, mostly showing rubbish. Why couldn’t the tennis have been shown on one of the other three?Exciting viewing: Jeremy Irons as Henry IV in the new Shakespeare series

Peter Reeve, who shot dead PC Ian Dibell in Clacton and who later killed himself, had recently been taking ‘antidepressant’ medication.

This is the case with a remarkable number of murder-suicides, and surely cries out for proper investigation.

Then there is Eva Rausing, whose pitiable descent into misery and death could not be prevented by her billions.

If she had been severely punished in an austere prison, instead of indulgently let off when she was caught with heroin and cocaine in 2008, might she now be alive?

I am convinced it would be far kinder to drug users to treat them as criminals, rather than pretend they are sick.

Finally Hannah Bonser was jailed for 22 years for murdering Casey Kearney, a stranger, in a park.

Bonser was originally unhinged by cannabis, a drug absurdly described as ‘soft’ by people who ought to know better, and to which the police and courts disgracefully turn a blind eye.

She was also prescribed ‘antipsychotic’ drugs, and who knows what effect they may have had?

And all this in a country where people fuss about drinking tap water as they think it might be too risky, and chemists are nervous about selling painkillers.

*********************************************************After the barrage of letters attacking me last week, I need to repeat and redouble my criticism of Sir Arthur Harris and the morally indefensible deliberate killing of German civilians during the 1939-45 war.

I urge anyone who still thinks the bombing was right to read Sir Max Hastings’s book Bomber Command, and especially the chapter on what happened when we bombed Darmstadt, a town with no significant military targets in it.

Many people wrote to me about this, and a gratifying number were prepared to consider the careful arguments and indisputable facts I sent to them to back up my case.To those who weren’t, I make this point.

Our national willingness to excuse the killing of innocents has corrupted this whole country ever since. It is one of the reasons for our terrifying moral decline. **********************************************************I would pay more for milk to save our dairy farmers from the greed of the supermarkets. Wouldn’t you?

**********************************************************Since the BBC couldn’t confirm the truth of claims of a massacre in Syria on Friday morning, why did they lead their bulletins with the story?

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09 July 2012 5:25 PM

Just a brief note to say how good I thought the BBC’s new version of ‘Henry IV, Part I’ was, when they eventually deigned to broadcast it on Saturday night. There was obviously some sort of tussle in the control room, but it seems to me that if you have scheduled a major new drama for 9.00 p.m. on a Saturday in the middle of Wimbledon, you can’t claim you didn’t know the men’s doubles might overrun, let alone the women’s doubles. Wimbledon, as an event, is pretty predictable. As far as I know its dates are fixed ages in advance, and tennis is famous for going on and on and on. If the BBC were really interested in culture, it would have been the tennis enthusiasts who were kept waiting, or perhaps shunted off on to one of the minor channels.

Anyway, I have long thought that TV and films are better ways of tackling Shakespeare than the stage. They can make soliloquies much more credible than they are on stage (Falstaff’s great attack on honour was beautifully done) and they can make a much better fist of courts, throne-rooms and battlefields.

It’s not just that our imaginations are spoiled by a century of cinema and TV. It is that Shakespeare’s texts are still so powerful that a cunning director can get *more* out of them than we knew was there when we read them on the page, or saw them on the stage. I still recall a terrific TV Hamlet, probably 40 or more years ago, filmed in a real castle (perhaps it was Elsinore), and there’s a Russian film version of Hamlet that is supposed to be so good that those who know the play at all can watch it with pleasure despite the language barrier.

By the way, in the old Cold War days, any English-speaking intelligent person in any Warsaw Pact country could be guaranteed, at some point in conversation, to say, meaningfully and with a pause ‘Something is rotten in the state of….Denmark’.

Kenneth Clark, in his great ‘Civilisation’ series said that Shakespeare wrote from an entirely irreligious point of view. I’m not so sure about this. I suspect many people have wanted to believe it because Shakespeare is obviously so thoughtful and intelligent, and much of his work is philosophy turned into flesh and blood and clothed in the most glorious poetry. I think religion, a knowledge of it and of its precepts, is simply assumed in so much that he writes (Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy, in which he complains that the Almighty has ‘fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter’ is a rare example of a direct reference, but the musing on death being a ‘bourne from which no traveller returns’ marks him out as being anything but a 21st-century materialist. It is from that unanswered question that all other questions arise).

Anyway, at a time when the country seems full of incompetence and hopelessness, it is a pleasure to see, form once, a great British institution making a serious effort to make a good fist of the works of Shakespeare, arguably the greatest Englishman who ever lived.

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31 January 2011 3:57 PM

In no particular order. Bert, with the pretentious and grandiose Greek pseudonym (well, at least it wasn't 'Pericles'), shows twice in one post that he is not reading what I say with any care. Persons with pretensions should be specially wary of this. First, he remarks: 'Thought Police? Nonsense. Gray and Keys were sacked by Sky, for goodness’ sake, from the same stable as Fox News, not some PC-gorn-mad local council.'

Now, what did I say? Here it is: 'Many of those who sang in this sanctimonious chorus are the sort who often complain in pubs about “political correctness gone mad”. But when it comes to it, they cravenly take part in the madness.' This is a large part of my point. Those who rely on the supposedly 'anti-PC' sections of society will find that they are a broken reed in any serious frenzy of this kind. And the effectiveness of PC depends almost entirely on its rules being adopted way beyond the GLC and the London boroughs where it was originally adopted in this country 30 years ago. It is amusing to go and read the cuttings in the newspapers on those times, and find most of the papers involved now fully signed up to, or mortally afraid of about 80% of the policies of Ken Livingstone. Those who mistake the noisy neo-conservatism of the Murdoch Empire for real conservatism surely haven't been reading this weblog or my column with any attention, either.

The crucial thing about the Thought Police is that we recognise them for what they are when they appear. Does 'Bert' imagine that they will always arrive in blue uniforms, with 'Thought Police' in big black letters on their high-viz jackets? No, what they want is for there to be agents of thought policing in every workplace, every school and broadcasting studio, and ultimately in every home. Mr Charrington and his colleagues are reserved for the hard cases.

Now here comes the Greek genius again, with this smug piece of half-informed loftiness: 'The EU is not responsible for fortnightly bin collections. I know this because I am currently living outside Britain but still in the EU and my bins are collected every week. The EU – including the UK – has indeed issued directives aimed at increasing recycling. Is that so bad?'

What did I say? This: 'Tory promises of a return to proper bin collections have turned out to be garbage, as I knew they would. Why? Because the EU’s landfill directive forces councils into recycling projects which mean fortnightly collections'.

The 'UK' has not issued any directives because the British government does not govern by directive. It still pretends to be a Parliamentary democracy and so it has to enact these directives, as Acts or Statutory Instruments, pretending that they are the will of Parliament. What our grandiose Greek friend does not grasp is that these directives have different effects in different countries, which is one of the reasons why they are pernicious, and why sovereign independent countries are better in all ways than supranational units such as the EU. Britain is more heavily dependent on landfill for the disposal of its rubbish than other EU countries, which is why this particular Directive was adopted without difficulty in Brussels, where our voice is weak and getting weaker.

As a country, we had no serious difficulties with landfill and could happily have continued disposing of our rubbish in this way were we independent. But this option is now closed to us because we are subject to EU power. The Landfill Directive, devised to suit the needs of the Low Countries, imposes huge and growing fines on countries which continue to use landfill, regardless of local conditions or desires. Thus councils in this country are under immense and growing financial pressure to dispose of their rubbish in other ways, and have resorted to recycling (and the fortnightly collections which this requires) to try to stay solvent.

About five minutes of research would have revealed these details to the man who uses the name of a great Classical historian to give himself airs. But, perhaps inflated by his own pseudonym, he reckoned he didn't need to trouble with such a thing as research. He just knew I was wrong, and couldn't even be bothered to read carefully what I had written The person whose name he so ridiculously borrows would not, I think, have behaved in this fashion. I suggest he now lays down this appellation non-controlee and adopts the more modest soubriquet of 'Bert' which I long ago awarded him.

On the question of boundary changes, my thanks to the thoughtful contributors on this subject. But please keep thinking. It is a large step from acknowledging that existing boundaries are unfair (they always are, and in 1951 this worked very much in the Tory interest, never let it be forgotten), to accepting that the proposed cure is the best way to deal with it. I am not sure that the plan for strictly equal constituencies will actually benefit the Tories much. Some recent studies have suggested that the main effect of the change will be to deprive the Liberal Democrats of many long-held seats based mainly on strong local organisation, which will be irrevocably broken up by new boundaries.

What I dislike about the plan is its almost Cromwellian nature - there is no proper appeal against the newly allocated boundaries. The old rule that there should be an effort to match a constituency with a recognisable or historically-existing community will be abandoned (and then there are the blatant and wholly inconsistent exceptions given to two Liberal Democrat seats, and actually, amazingly written into the Bill). But above all I dislike the fact that it has barely been debated by the very chamber that is most affected by it - to the extent that I don't think most Tory MPs really understand that every single one of them will face a reselection battle, as every existing seat will disappear. The Lords are simply insisting that it be given proper consideration, not crammed through in an evening by the whips, and repented at leisure by the country.

James E. Shaw comments: 'The important thing about The King's Speech is that it remains true to the spirit of what happened, Peter.'Thanks, Mr Shaw, I know what my name is, even today. Matron is not yet needed to let me know. But as for 'remaining true to the spirit of what happened', does it?

Absolutely not. In fact, I thank Mr Shaw for helping me to clarify this point. The suggestion is strongly made that it was Logue's jaunty Aussie irreverence that cracked the Royal carapace of repression and excessive dignity, and cured the monarchical stammer. This is egalitarian wish-fulfilment. And it appears to be wholly untrue. Far from being true to events, it imposes the prejudices of our own age on a past which we prefer to misunderstand than to study (this is the reason why it tramples on the far more interesting truth about Winston Churchill's role in the Abdication).

Mr Shaw adds: 'Yes it takes liberties with the truth, as do most works of historical fiction. Shakespeare's Richard III being a classic example.'

Yes, quite, and I once again recommend Josephine Tey's wonderful detective story 'The Daughter of Time' to any breathing person as a necessary corrective to Shakespeare's fine old pack of lies which has helped to twist English history for centuries. Shakespeare's denigration of Richard is Tudor propaganda, crammed with falsehood. It is better to know this before seeing the play, than not to know it.

I am told that 'objectivity is crucial 'in a football commentator's job. Really? I thought one of the glories of sports journalism was that all pretence of objectivity could be chucked aside.

I thought the comment from John Dunn deeply instructive. He accuses me of: 'A complete misunderstanding (I hope it’s not just blind ignorance) of Equality and Diversity' He then reveals that he is himself a 'qualified Equality and Diversity Advisor in the RAF'.

This is hugely interesting. Mr Dunn plainly genuinely does not grasp that there are actually people who do not agree with the 'Equality and Diversity' programme. He thinks the question settled beyond doubt. And he works for the Royal Air Force. I promise him that I am by no means ignorant of it. He more bizarrely does not grasp that I am one of those (more than he thinks, I hope) who doesn't agree with it, indeed that it is one of the main things that I do, disagreeing with it. He might also check the index under 'Political Correctness' and 'May, Theresa.'

I do also very much recommend him to read my book 'The Cameron Delusion', in which I seek to explain that the categories he uses (in which all forms of 'discrimination' are considered identical and equally reprehensible) is factually and logically untenable. He will at least then be introduced to the idea that his beliefs are not universally held (believe me, I know that mine aren't) and shown why this is so.

As for his self-description as a 'qualified Equality and Diversity Advisor in the RAF', I think that (provided he is not winding us all up) the existence of this post goes to confirm my often-made point that 'Equality and Diversity' is now the official state dogma of this country, reaching even into its formerly most conservative areas, and that political correctness is a not a passing joke but a project to change the world. He isn't in the slightest bit embarrassed to be such a thing, and doesn't (I suspect) realise how funny and/or absurd the combination will seem to many readers here. We should learn from this that the day is far spent, and it is far later than we believed.